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A creek so narrow you hardly got your feet wet divided a village for more than four decades. By an accident of geography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by pine forests, meadows and stunning scenery, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a frontier that was established first by a barrier and then by a barricade. United States military personnel nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

A few months after their own wall was opened, and before their state had become one in 1990, a assembly of local people set about commemorating their history. The effort is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will open. It was officially inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not entirely ready. Telling the residents who experienced the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an inhuman split, which pulled families apart and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel split, which ripped families into pieces and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Bygone Origins

Even at its founding in 1810, the community straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most famous for assigning all its men the designation Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the quirk was never an obstacle in the path of the residents gathering in the same inn, visiting the same place of worship and enrolling their children to the very same school.

After the War Separation

Subsequently occurred the World War II. As soon as they arrived, the Russian troops erected wood stakes by the brook. For a twelve months they seized the complete hamlet, setting up their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers convinced them to retreat to the other side of the stream. For a period, villagers could still cross over, though as restrictions tightened they were obliged to present identity papers, despite the fact that each person was aware who they were, and to return at night.

Intensification of Frontier Controls

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was built, with landmines, tank traps and guard posts. The residents could continue to view each other by climbing elevations, but on the Soviet side signaling and yelling were prohibited. A female resident was added to a GDR intelligence watch list for answering “likewise” to a West German resident who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I was told stories such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent much of his professional career creating it. Locals were polled early on about how how long a section wall they desired to keep. They opted for a stretch on the Bavarian edge, near where one of their own managed to get away in the middle of the night with a ladder, subsequently the frontier was substantially fortified.

Maintained Installations

A pair of watchtowers are conserved in addition to a set of displays illustrating the most significant moments in the community’s chronicle. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the regulations: nobody could come within 5km of the border. Agricultural workers required particular approval to tend to their crops; the spouse could operate the combine harvester but under no circumstances the two, in case they sought to flee. Armed guards stood watch.

Wider Perspective

The frontier between West Germany and the GDR ran 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to the south in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most frequently, but in excess of double the number individuals (exceeding 300) were killed trying to traverse it in countryside regions than in the big city. the director reminds me that 95 percent of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by staying low-profile and looking after their farms. They did not backed the socialist government nor fought it, the director states.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the village became a sort of site of interest. Roughly fifteen thousand visited each year, viewing tools in hand, to look – and then swiftly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

25 years after unification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a made-up hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, led to fresh curiosity.

Current Evolutions

The launch of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, shop, movie theater and large car park – is expected to